January 07, 2013

Talk for MLA 2012 panel on "Poet Scholar."

I have an autobiographical relation to the poet scholar category. I wanted to be a poet. I went and got a PhD in English with the idea that even the TA line would be a sort of day job. At the time this being a poet and being a scholar felt not quite related. My first job was as a scholar. My
second, and current, job is as a creative writer. Everyone told me for years I had to be one or the other. I continued to muddle on as both. There is nothing unique about
this story, so I will present it as anecdotal example. I will in these notes
just quickly attempt to enumerate the terrain which I think might explain how
we have found ourselves at a panel on the poet scholar at the MLA in 2012. I
will draw no conclusions from it.

When I was applying for that
first job, I thought I was entering the job market in its decline. Casual or
adjunct appointments were at around 30%. This felt catastrophic. The general
thinking was that that there was no way it could get worse. Who would do the
service?, it was often said by colleagues in the hallways, it would be unsustainable to go lower. But then adjunct
labor was teaching 50% of the classes when I got this second job in 2003 as a
poet, in what Mark Nowak calls the American neoliberal MFA industry. What I
realize now that I couldn’t see then was that despite the massive casualization
of academic labor, I was at the same time getting a job in what is looking like
it might very well be an MFA bubble economy. When I got my first job in 1995,
there were somewhere maybe around sixty-five MFA programs. In 2009 there were around
194. I got these numbers from Seth Abramson. And in his estimate the cohort
groups for these programs average out to about 20. So in less than fifteen
years, the US has gone from producing around 1300 to close to 4000 MFAs per
year. Many of these MFA programs are clustered at tuition dependent
universities (although some state universities have begun to see these programs
as good ideas because they can educate that casual labor pool they so need to have around). But there are next
to no employment prospects for these graduates, which wouldn’t necessarily have
to be a problem if not for how so many have funded their degrees through large
amounts of student loans. This is why the MFA numbers look unsustainable.

Parallel to what is looking like
an unsustainable MFA bubble, is what I might call the “possible creative
writing-ization” of the English major. Again, numbers here are hard to find, so
I’ll resort to anecdote. When I was an undergraduate way back in the 80s, colleges
and universities tended to treat creative writing classes like candy, too many
would make you sick and weak. The small liberal arts college that I attended
taught two poetry workshops a year: a beginning and an advanced one. You had to
apply to take them. 12 students were admitted. The rest, it was felt, did not
deserve such a pleasure. Other schools, if they even had a creative writing
major, tended to limit the creative writing majors. They had a gateway
admissions process and only a certain number were allowed to be majors. Some
schools, especially big state universities, still use this model. But in
general, as the university system has begun to see students less as children
whose candy intake should be regulated and more as consumers whose candy
tuition money they want, they tend not to regulate but to provide. Anecdote
again: the small liberal arts college where I now teach when I began teaching
there used the limited class offerings model to regulate creative writing
majors. Each semester there was a beginning and an advanced, waiting lists and
demand be damned. At a certain point, the department begins to receive more and
more pressure from the administration to enroll whatever would enroll however
it would enroll. So the department began to offer more and more undergraduate
workshops. Now the department’s unregulated undergraduate creative writing
majors tend to double undergraduate English majors.

There are numerous reasons for
this: the grades in creative writing classes are obviously higher; the reading
is less; the writing has a lower word count; etc. But not all of them are necessarily
negative or lazy assumptive. I’d like to think that students might also be
looking at the five page seminar paper, the continued tendency to teach mainly
the literatures of only two nations, and the strict century coverage model that
begins in the early modern period, and think to themselves, well at least the novel,
say, has the possibility of being read by someone outside of the classroom.

Beyond anecdote, there is a
fairly obvious piece of evidence to support this “possible creative
writing-ization” of English departments. Although the AWP started in 1967, it
did not feel compelled to hold a conference until 2005. It started small, with
3000 attendees. Last year it had 11,000 attendees and it expects more this
year. The MLA at its peak in the mid-1990s maxed out with around 12,000 people
attending its conference. Last year it had around 7,000.

I doubt this “possible creative
writing-ization” is in anyway a permanent change to English departments. And
that is how it should be. However, it definitely has had a major impact on the
hiring patterns of English departments and English departments will be changed
by this for years to come. And while whatever happens next remains to be seen, I
doubt it will look like a retreat to what English departments looked like in
what we might now want to begin to call the glory days of the 1990s. The
profession is obviously in the middle of a profound metamorphosis of some sort,
from the fairly dramatic funding cuts that are privatizing the state university
systems to the increasing evidence that the private system might have reached
peak tuition a few years ago and might now be massively overpriced in relation
to student ability and/or willingness to pay or borrow in a fairly stagnant
employment market. And then English departments have their own narratives
within these large scale changes. I’m not sure, in short, that the profession
could pay its composition and intro class instructors so little if it were not
for the current large numbers of MFA graduates. It is also worth remembering
that when Bennington fired all its tenured line faculty, under the advice of
John Barr—recently retired president of the Poetry Foundation, they justified
this by saying that they wanted to hire working artists and writers rather than
scholars. But that is another talk for another panel, the one on the role of
creative writing programs in the privatization of education or the one on the
role of MFA programs in the casualization of the labor of English departments.

That said, I don’t really have a
profound conclusion here. Except, as much as it might be the time of the
“possible creative writing-ization” of English departments, it might also be
the time of the poet-scholar. And what it means to be a poet scholar feels one
that is full of these issues. I’ve been a bit grumpy about it all. But one of
the potentially productive things that could happen out of this “possible
creative-writing-ization” of English departments is that this old standoff
between creative writing and scholarship might dissolve. One thing that I’ve
noticed where I now teach is that as the number of creative writing majors have
grown, more and more students are writing a creative thesis that is basically a
form of scholarship. In recent years, in addition to the usual retellings of
Jane Austen novels, I’ve read an novelization of a queer subtext of Shakespeare’s
Henry the 8th, a feminist reworking of a series of classic male performance art
pieces, a detournment of a Hemingway short story with the genders reversed, etc.
I am, in short, watching undergraduate students attempt to write what I might
call “more interesting to me literary scholarship” and they are reading and
thinking and arguing with the informed critiques and discussions of the field.
Although I should admit that graduate students are still doing what they tend
to do. They are still writing, with a few lovely and notable exceptions and god
bless these, the mainly confessional, even when experimental, observations
about their lives and their loves and sometimes the weather and the land and
the suburban animals.